Can someone who uses slack comment on the value over skype for example?
It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.
It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.
Slack builds upon a lot of core concepts that IRC had but differs in a few ways. 1) Simplicity, you can get up and running in a few minutes and have your whole team connected. 2) Managed hosting, maintenance and client updates 3) Excellent UX, features are intuitive and new features are introduced with guidance 4) Cross platform support and fast mobile clients 5) Integrations, being able to push and pull data across you apps from the place your entire team can communicate is incredibly powerful. The discoverability and ease of deployment (some can be deployed in a few minutes).
I think they have a great position in the SMB market. Surprisingly some enterprise organizations still use IRC internally due to the control they have over server/data etc. There is probably an opportunity for Slack to develop an on-premise solution for enterprise.
And of course, discussion threads. This is something Slack still doesn't have, and is a one of the reasons to stay with Flowdock instead. Everyone knows what happens with IRC channels when there's hundreds of people and multiple simultaneous discussions. Good luck trying to follow the conversation if you weren't following it realtime.
That said, it sadly seems that Slack will eat the whole pie, and it is probably the most future-proof choice at the moment.
Searching your conversation history in Skype is terrible. Slack really does this well.